Game of Thrones star “expected people to not like” the final season

Jacob Anderson played Grey Worm for five seasons on Game of Thrones. He joined the show just as it was becoming a proper phenomenon and lasted all the way to the end, when the final season infamously angered fans to the point where nearly two million of them signed a petition for HBO to remake it.

The backlash to Game of Thrones season 8 has become the stuff of internet legend. Things got heated there for a while. Obviously, that wasn’t fun for the cast or crew to endure, including Jacob Anderson. “I didn’t have strong feelings about the finale,” he told PopSugar. “I think everybody assumes that we all hated it. That’s not the case at all. I remember when I first got the scripts for that final season, I was like, ‘There’s something kind of punk about this season. It feels risky.’ And I feel like it was kind of fun. I enjoyed it and it was fun to make. It was full on, but it was fun to make.”

"We were filming for 11 months in the snow and there were thousands and thousands of people worked so hard on [the final season]. And then for it to just, when it came out for people to just straight up be like, ‘You need to remake this. This is terrible. This is the worst thing ever.’ It was a little bit sad."

Jacob Anderson: Fan reaction to Game of Thrones season 8 was “a little bit sad”

The reasons that people disliked the final season are well-known: mainly, it came down to fans not jiving with some of the big plot twists, especially Daenerys Targaryen torching King’s Landing and Bran Stark being crowned the new king. I’m of the opinion that the twists were fine; the problem was that the show didn’t give itself enough time to work up to them.

But we’re not here to rehash that. Whatever the issues with the final season, Anderson did have an inkling ahead of time that people might not completely enjoy it. “But to be honest, I expected people to not like it, even though I liked it,” he said. “I thought people were going to be annoyed by things.”

The Game of Thrones franchise is on something of a redemption arc right now thanks to the new prequel series House of the Dragon, which has mostly been well-received. As for Anderson, he’s playing Louis in an excellent new adaptation of Interview With The Vampire on AMC. Unfortunately, we won’t see the second seasons of either show for a while.

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